Tag: books

I Know a Place

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment and all is well. I slept incredibly last night. I woke up at seven and stayed in bed relaxing in a half-sleep for another hour or so, and finally got up when Sparky woke up and decided he was hungry. He was delayed this morning–and was very calm and cuddly and sleepy yesterday–because of the vaccines he got yesterday, as well as the shock to his system of leaving the apartment. He likes his carrier–he’ll go in there on his own, and Paul often tells him to go get in the crate when he’s having Big Kitten Energy, which he does–but he finally started meowing yesterday when we took him outside in the crate. He’s never meowed before, only chirped, which worried me a bit…but now he’s done it so I guess he only meows when he’s unhappy. His nails were trimmed (which he also didn’t like this time), but we brought him home to be a sleepy, cuddly sweet kitty for the rest of the night. We also went to Costco yesterday, which was nice and a little tiring. We watched Skate America last night (ladies and pairs short programs) and of course, today is a football all day kind of day. LSU plays at Arkansas tonight, and of course Alabama-Tennessee is this afternoon’s game. I am going to take books to the library sale this morning and go to the grocery store today before I come home to watch games for the rest of the day. There’s also some cleaning I can do around here this morning, too. Yippee!

I’m also going to read some more of Gabino’s book this morning; I read some while Sparky and Paul were with the vet yesterday and I just love the way he writes, in this interesting combination of Jim Thompson crossed with some John D. MacDonald but heavily flavored and filtered through his own remarkable talent in a unique voice that is entirely his own. It’s very rare to come across a writer with a voice and style so strikingly original, and the pacing is ethereal but also fast at the same time. I loved his last book, and I am absolutely loving this own. Next weekend I’ll be heading up to Kentucky to see Dad for about a week, so I can listen to another horror novel in the car (maybe Shadowland by Peter Straub, which I’ve not read before. I can take the paperback with me if the audio book is too long for a twelve hour drive; I actually just went to Audible and got Nick Cutter’s The Troop, and saw that I had a Riley Sager already downloaded, so that’s the trip up and back sorted. I also got the Straub), and I can take some horror with me to read. I’ll make shrimp tempura for dinner tonight, and am kind of torn about making chili or not tomorrow, but will probably go ahead and do so; I may even make it over night so tomorrow morning I can just get up and put it in the refrigerator. That’ll sort my lunches for the week, methinks.

I also managed to get the majority of the dishes done yesterday, no small feat I might add. That’ll teach me to be lazy when I get home from work every day, won’t it? It seemed endless, and I was also doing the bed linens at the same time as well as unpacking Costco and putting everything away; the living room is, even now, filled with empty boxes that need to go out this morning. I need to revise that short story and start working on another one for the Bouchercon anthology open call; I picked out the story just have to finish it now, which is also no easy chore. But today is an official day off from everything other than relaxation, reading and some cleaning around the house. I’ll try to reread the story I’ve selected; I just need to remember to channel my rage at developments in the neighborhood and on my street–this is one of the reasons I love being a writer, petty revenge on people who’ll never even know they inspired me to kill them in fiction–and retrieve that voice from deep inside my head. I think one of the problems I’ve had with some of the stories I’ve been writing lately is I’ve been too lazy to write about people the way they really are, instead of an idealized character who is logical and rational and then simply snaps. It’s that breakdown of going from law-abiding to murderous that I live to explore–it worked really well in “Neighborhood Alert”–but in some of the noirish stories I’ve been trying to write and sell since the pandemic they come across as too cheerful; bitterness and rage is what drives my stories, and the tone and voice need to reflect that.

Tone and voice are key to whether your story works or not.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later. GEAUX TIGERS!

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Game of Love

Thursday morning and I forgot to set my alarm last night; oh my! Bad Gregalicious; bad Gregalicious! I did run my errands last night after I got off work, but by the time I got home I was more tired than I expected. I intended to do the dishes at the very least, if nothing else, and sure enough, I sat down in my chair to catch up on the news and let Sparky treat me like prey (my entire body is covered in scabs), but relaxed so deeply that when Paul came downstairs–he was home and I didn’t know it–to watch some television, I was all fuck it and blew everything off. We watched this week’s English Teacher, which isn’t as funny as it initially was? Paul agreed with me, so it’s not just me being hypercritical of a show with a gay male lead–which is always my fear. The representation is great, but I am not sure if I’m missing something, or if it is the show itself. Something for me to think about, I guess, in greater length once the season is over and we can reflect on it as a whole, rather than just as individual episodes. It’s a very fine line–you don’t want to idealize a marginalized character, but at the same time the series lead has to be likable and relatable; which is a problem because you run the risk of castrating him–and this character has a MUCH healthier sex-life than Will Truman ever had in all those many seasons of Will and Grace. we also watched an episode of American Horror Stories, which was creepy and disturbing, but at least it was interesting. The show reminds me of the great old anthology shows, like Tales from the Crypt and Night Gallery1, and yes, some episodes are better than others.

So tonight, obviously, I need to write some and clean up the house before my work-at-home day tomorrow. I know we’re planning on a Costco run, so I am going to need to do some serious work on the apartment to get ready for that. I also need to finish the desk chair, which is sitting, unassembled, in front of the fireplace–and there are any number of things in the living room that need to be gotten rid of. I have to take the boxes of books to the library sale Saturday; and I also need to start boxing up the books in the kitchen cupboards and moving them up to the attic, which also needs to be cleaned out. I need to work on the book this weekend, and maybe do some serious decision-making; I also need to work on polishing that short story and revising/finishing another by the end of the month. I feel a bit out of it this morning–the oversleeping didn’t help matters much by throwing off my daily rhythm, but I was wide awake when I got up finally, and I managed to not forget anything on my way out of the house. This should be a relatively easy and uneventful day at the office, and my supervisor will be back on Monday, thank you Jesus and pass the ammunition.

Wish me luck on all of that, please. I also need to make a to-do list for this weekend. There are some great football games on Saturday; LSU at Arkansas, Alabama at Tennessee, for starters. I’ll definitely need to run my Saturday morning errands early! I also need to read Gabino’s book; I hope I’m not giving the wrong impression–it’s nothing to do with the book, but more along the lines of being too tired to focus to read once I’ve done everything I’ve needed to get done every day. I am feeling better, getting more restful sleep, and I think I’ve adjusted to getting up early, little as I like to do so, but I always have that little rundown in the afternoon when I get overwhelmed with being tired…but it’s usually low blood sugar or something, because a snack will rev me back up again.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great Thursday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later. It’ll be a surprise!

  1. I remember watching Night Gallery as a child and loving it; I wasn’t able to catch reruns of The Twilight Zone until many years later; so to me, I always think Night Gallery when I think about Rod Serling, whose daughter I met and she was absolutely charming. ↩︎

Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag

Well, yesterday wasn’t so bad, really. The office didn’t burn down in my absence (didn’t think it would) and there was no mess for me to clean up anywhere, so that was nice. I also felt good for most of the day; I had energy and didn’t feel sleepy in the least. I managed to come home from work and get the thing done that needed to be done for today; I also revised and rewrote that short story before discovering the deadline is actually October 20th, so I have time to go over it once again before turning it in for the perusal of the editors. It’s a reach to meet their theme, but nothing ventured and all that. I won’t be disappointed too much if they turn me down. I also have another story to write by the end of the month, and I am not sure which one I have on hand to use for it. Something to look into for this weekend, methinks. And I need to get back to work on Scotty. Heavy sigh.

But I never felt any stress about the deadlines, and I managed to get both things worked on, which I am quite pleased with myself about, frankly. I am rather pleased with the new version of the story; it really does need to be revised one more time (not the least of which is that it’s too long; I always think 5k when writing a story but the CFS for this is 4k max, so some pruning and tightening is in order. I also managed to sleep really well again last night and feel great this morning. I wasn’t tired when I got home, either. After I got through with working, I happily collapsed into my easy chair and caught up on the news. I do think this approach to this year’s election–staying calm and blocking the legacy media1–is the right way to go. I have felt a lot less stressed about everything without losing my shit at the insanity of said legacy media’s insane bias. It doesn’t mean that I’m not worried about the outcome–I am, very much so–but the weight of it all doesn’t need to rest on my shoulders. Thank God for anxiety medications, and the clear-headedness those medications give me.

Today’s goal is to figure out what short story to use for this other call for submissions that is due at the end of the month. I literally have no clue, off the top of my head, and so I am going to have to go through the files and figure out which one I can either finish or revise. A tough problem to have, don’t you think? I kind of want to work on short stories at the moment, which has everything to do with revising one yesterday. Once the dam breaks, and all that stuff and nonsense. I’m just delighted to be writing again, and even more delighted that I am prioritizing my work for once (and from now on). I’ll still do the occasional volunteer thing now and again, but nothing that requires a lengthy commitment or has any urgency; I’ve sacrificed my mental health and my writing for far too long on things that ultimately had no benefit for me other than satisfaction–and sometimes I never even got that, so it’s time for someone else to do whatever it was I thought I was accomplishing. I also have little to no interest in my legacy. I am always amused a bit when I hear writers talk about things like that. For one thing, that’s not for me to decide. Did I make a contribution to American letters? The mystery genre? Queer writing? Most likely not; I am not going to be studied in future college lit courses–genre, for one; gay for the other–and once I’m gone–or stop producing work, I’ll be forgotten, and I am fine with that. The books will all float around on the Internet for years after my death so they are there for the finding. Maybe in a hundred years some scholar will stumble over my work and make a case for me as one of the unsung heroes of crime fiction, but I rather doubt it. In either case, I won’t be here to see it, so why even worry about it? Talk about a waste of energy!

We’re having a cold spell–a front for a few days–where the highs will be in the sixties and the lows in the fifties. It’s fifty-nine right now, brisk and crisp; it will definitely help me sleep and will definitely help bring the power bill down. We resist turning on the heat until it’s actually in the fifties inside, and the heat is far cheaper than air conditioning. I also need to run errands after work today, and then once I am home I need to progress on the apartment before settling into my chair for the evening. I’ve also got to figure out my doctor’s appointments and try to reschedule them all for the same day–or at least to have as many on the same day as possible. Sigh. This is what we call gumbo weather; when you spend the morning in the kitchen making a nice big pot of it–the cooking of it also keeps you warm, and it certainly does warm you up on the inside when you eat it. If the weather holds through the weekend I’ll probably make some kind of shrimp dish–shrimp creole or shrimp scampi or something like that. I also like making potato leek soup and white bean chicken chili (but that will require a Costco trip at some point). I do love the fall here in Louisiana…and it also looks like the two systems the Hurricane Center is monitoring aren’t going to develop into anything for a brief respite.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I may be back later; one never really knows for certain, does one?

  1. They have been committing journalistic malpractice since at least 2015, if not longer. ↩︎

Old Man from the Mountain

Tuesday morning and back to the spice mines blog. Huzzah! I feel a bit disoriented this morning, as one always does after even the shortest of trips, and was still pretty tired from the driving yesterday. I ran a few errands and cleaned up the kitchen, doing the dishes and puttering around the house for the most part. I’m still digesting Survivor Song–thinking about dystopian novels and stories–and we watched Outer Banks last night, finishing the first half of the season (all that’s available; the second half will probably drop in a month or do), which is ridiculous and campy and weird and fun, like the first two seasons were (the third was disappointing, really), so I hope that it will continue in this vein and leave the third season in the dust and past. But of course, taking a much-needed rest day has kind of put me behind the eight ball; I have work that’s due tomorrow and I don’t know how much time I will have this evening to try to get everything done as much as possible.

There are also two areas meteorologists are watching for hurricane development–one in the Atlantic, the other in the western Caribbean, off the coast of Central America–so we’re not out of the woods yet; hurricane season after all doesn’t end until December 1. We’re also getting a cold front coming in tonight, which means overnight temperatures in the fifties. Yikes! Practically the dead of winter. But I’ll be coming straight home from work, too, so hopefully the nice weather will hold out until then.

My, I’m exciting this morning. I do feel rested, and I do feel like I can get everything done I need to get done by tomorrow, but it’s still a bit daunting to think ahead and hope I won’t have to work through being tired. I also need to get some work done on the book, and I also need to finish the Scotty Bible; I only have three books left to get the notes from, and then I need to go through the whole thing one last time, and voila! It will be finished. I also need to fix some things in the chapters I’ve already written. I think I shall plan to get everything now finished by the end of the month, so I can spend November getting the rest of the first draft done. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, actually, and so I think that’s going to be the plan going forward. I need to get this story revised, and I need to revise another for the Bouchercon anthology; I’m thinking I should submit something to it. It’ll depend on any number of other factors, of course; but a reasonable writing schedule should be easy to follow, methinks.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about that wretched professor who told me at seventeen I would never be published as a writer. In my utter obliviousness (part of never looking back, I’m afraid) I never made the connection in my head that it was that experience that derailed my college career and my twenties. I always assumed that it was the entire duality of living two completely separate lives as well as the HIV/AIDS pandemic that sent me spiraling down into a pit from which I didn’t think I’d ever emerge. I never wanted to be anything other than a writer, and being told by a person in authority (I was also always taught to respect authority, and I was only seventeen, so he was a PROFESSOR who KNEW what he was talking about, so if he said it–well, I had to believe it. I had been groomed my entire life to take the voice of authority as gospel and never to question it; so when he said that to me I saw my future yawning open as a life of quiet desperation and misery. I didn’t think I could ever truly be myself, and the only thing that had gotten me through my childhood–the dream of being an author–was ripped away from me. Is it any wonder that what I started basically doing was putting off adulthood? My development was so derailed, which is why I always write off my twenties as the lost decade (although it really carried over for another three years), and just don’t think about it much. But my resentment for that fucking asshole college professor is far deeper and much more powerful now, and I may need to revisit that essay I wrote about his skank ass.

Of course, I am over forty novels and fifty short stories into my professional writing career…and he never published anything. In fact, he was a bitter failed author; the definition of “those who can’t, teach” (which is a horrible phrase, really, that I hate and usually refuse to use, but I have no problem using it on that bottom-feeder) in bright three dimensional living color.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I hope you have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll chat at you later, okay?

zombie

Paul Tremblay has managed to turn himself into one of my favorite authors currently writing horror; I can’t think of a single novel of his that hasn’t been utterly fantastic, or that I haven’t enjoyed. He manages to make his characters absolutely real–with flaws and hang-ups; so much that sometimes you want to shake some sense into them–and the situations they find themselves in, while certainly horrific, are realistic. That, of course, is what makes the so horrible and terrifying; it’s easy to see yourself in his characters and stories. I also love his writing style; there’s something lyrical and poetic about his sentence construction and word choices, creating rhythms that make the words kind of sing in your head.

I wasn’t sure if I should, in that case, listen to one of his novels as an audiobook–would that musical sense of language carry over?

I needn’t have worried.

This is not a fairy tale. Certainly it is not one that has been sanitized, homogenized, or Disneyfied. bloodless in every possible sense of the word, beasts and human monsters defanged and claws clipped, the children safe and the children saved, the hard truths harvested from hard lives if not lost than obscured, and purposefully so.

Last night there was confusion as to whether turning off the lights was a recommendation or if it was a requirement in accordance with the government mandated curfew. After her husband, Paul, was asleep, Natalie relied on her cell phone’s flashlight in the bathroom as a guide instead of lighting a candle. She has been getting clumsier by the day and didn’t trust herself to casually carry fir through the house.

It’s quarter past 11 a.m. and yes, she is in the bathroom again. Before Paul left three hours ago, she joked she should set up a cot and an office in here. It’s first-floor window overlooks the semi-private backyard and the sun-bleached, needs-a-cost-of-stain picket fence. The grass is dead, having months prior surrendered to the withering heat of yet another record-breaking summer.

The heat will be blamed for the outbreak. There will be scores of other villains, some heroes too. It will be years before the virus’ full phylogenetic tree is mapped, and even then, there will continue to be doubters, naysayers, and the most cynical political opportunists. The truth will go unheeded by some, as it invariably does.

To wit, Natalie can’t stop reading the fourteen-day-old Facebook post on her town’s “Stoughton Enthusiasts” page. There are currently 2,312 comments. Natalie has read them all.

This was a book I didn’t want to read at the time of its release; and I am kind of glad I waited to get into it for a few years; while I was certainly reading a lot of plague fiction in the summer of 2020, when this book was released, the thought of reading something new about a plague whilst in the midst of one seemed–I don’t know, too real for me? The older stuff I revisited, both fiction and non, were things I had already read at some point in my life and therefore couldn’t be applied to the quarantine situation we were experiencing at that time. Of course, four years later, my own time-line is kind of fuzzy and off; it was a disorienting time, and it clearly broke the brains of a lot of people. Reading (listening) to the book four years later–without access of any kind to the pub date of the book, which I couldn’t remember in the car–I thought, wow, he really captured the insanity of the quarantine AND how people would react to it, so you can imagine my surprise to see it actually was written and already moving through the publishing pipeline for release before the pandemic began, which is frightening how eerily prescient Tremblay’s book actually is/was. (Although, imagining the right launching into conspiracy theories and blowing off quarantines and safety precautions and arming themselves–is it that prescient?)

The pandemic/plague in Tremblay’s book is a highly infectious, rapid onset variant of the rabies virus–so animals get it and become dangerous, and the infections can spread to humans. Once bitten or exposed, the human doesn’t have long before the virus takes over and leads, after a mad frenzy of attacking anyone or anything, to a painful death. Natalie and her husband Paul are coping with the quarantines, the breakdown in supply chains, the shortage of necessary supplies; a trip to the grocery store, never more than an hour to and from, including the shopping, can now take up to or more than four hours, as she is finding out that morning as she waits for him to come home. She’s in her ninth month of pregnancy, and that’s what she primarily focuses on, like most normal people do. Unfortunately shortly after Paul comes home, an infected man breaks into their house, kills Paul, and manages to bite her in the arm before she can finally kill him and escape. Natalie calls her best friend and college roommate–a doctor named Ramola–for help.

Ramola comes to pick up her friend, and the rest of the novel is the two women desperately trying to get to a hospital to try to get her treatment as well as a c-section to deliver the baby in case the treatments don’t work. It’s a race against time, and the suspense ratchets up to a unbearable level, as the two women–and everyone they encounter–encounter difficulties and roadblocks, not sure who they can trust and who they can’t, as they try to save both mother and child. Tremblay also takes the opportunity, whenever it arises, to chastise the anti-science movement in this country (which was saw in force that summer of 2020) for it’s radical views and beliefs that endanger everyone because of their own selfishness; again, was that prescience or simply the obvious conclusion to make? Even Ramola and Natalie, in their desperation, sometimes act in an incredibly selfish manner to achieve their own ends that makes me want to shake them both–which is another terrific insight on human behavior; we will always put our own individual needs ahead of the abstract “group” needs.1

It’s a very good book, and like the best fiction, it make me think. A lot, not just about American privilege and selfishness, but about dystopian fiction and disaster-type novels like this–which will inevitably become a Substack essay at some point.

Definitely recommended.

  1. This is something that often irritates me in these types of novels; leaders in these books will inevitably always put their own selfish needs ahead of those of the group (looking at you, Cell). ↩︎

I’m A Ramblin’ Man

And here we are, heading back into a Monday and a brand new work week. My supervisor is currently enjoying herself in London for the next two weeks, which makes me the go-to guy for all things testing related and for my program. It may be stressful and exhausting, or it could be totally smooth sailing. I’m also meeting Dad this weekend in Alabama. I’ll have to pick out a horror novel to listen to in the car….I suppose I could continue listening to the podcast I’m thoroughly enjoying, My Dad Wrote a Porno, but probably will go with a book. I’m going to take a week off later in the month and go up to Kentucky–which means more books to listen to.

It was, in some ways, a rejuvenating kind of weekend; I rested a lot Friday evening and Saturday, and as such, felt good yesterday. It was also a lovely day in New Orleans; I walked around the neighborhood to take pictures of the aftermath of a fire the other night just past the corner of Magazine and Hastings1 (she was renting one of the places for Mardi Gras, and had to find another place, obviously), then walked back home, got in the car because I needed gas, and after fueling her up I went to the Fresh Market. Paul was working with his trainer, and once he got back from the gym we watched two movies–The Fall Guy, which we really enjoyed and was a rather fun, charming movie (you can never go wrong with Emily Blunt, and Ryan Gosling was goofily adorable the way he always is) that had a truly terrific supporting cast as well, including Hannah Waddingham, and a true crime documentary that wasn’t good. I slept really well last night, too, and feel pretty good already this morning. I didn’t do much work on the book this weekend, but I did finish marking up the Scotty books, so that’s done. I also had another idea about structure with this book, which is going to be tricky from hereon out to pull off, but I think I can do it, and that’s a very good thing. I also managed to finally finish my blog entry review of Alison Gaylin’s We Are Watching, but you should have know that already if you stop by regularly. I also didn’t read much this weekend, either; it was more about recovery and rest this past weekend than anything else.

I am, by the way, loving the weather. It’s been so beautiful lately, other than the soggy mess that was Friday, which kicked my sinuses into gear, which was partly why I didn’t get anything done. I need to be more careful of my time, though. I’ve gotten so used to spending the weekend recovering from the week and losing track of time (because I feel like I have so much of it every week when Friday rolls around), so should probably start trying to structure the weekends more so I can get things done. I’d forgotten that when you have more free time you need to structure it a little better–but it’s kind of fun just doing what I want when I want to, I must say. I have to get used to this free time thing, and what a horrible problem for me to have, right? There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious, after all–as long as you don’t let your failure to meet goals (from being lazy and having too much free time) affect your self-worth and stop belittling/demeaning myself. I’ve done pretty well for myself as a writer, overall, and considering I did it all mostly on my own–that’s saying something.

I think one of the most important things for me going forward is to cure myself of Imposter Syndrome; I know I’ve talked about how I was raised and how I was taught to be about work–keep your ego out of it2 and let others see the work you do and let them appreciate it. The problem is people never like to let a writer know they enjoyed something–but they do know how to register an outraged opinion. I do the best I can with everything I write, and if I am a better writer than I was twenty-five years ago, good. (I must confess, revisiting Scotty to do the Bible was a pleasant surprise, as the books are actually good.) I also know that there’s nothing I can’t do or achieve if I set my mind to it and plan and stick to it. I did think a lot about writing this weekend–and what are the things I want to write and do over the next few years. It’s so lovely being clear-headed, seriously–you have no idea. The fog is clearing! I feel like GREG again for the first time in nearly a decade. And I’m kind of excited about it, if that makes sense? For example, I saw a news story the other day that gave me not only an insight but a clue to how to fix “Festival of the Redeemer”; that will be fun to rewrite and fix. I also had some thoughts and ideas for Never Kiss a Stranger, Muscles, Chlorine, and the next Scotty–French Quarter Flambeaux, another Mardi Gras novel. I had hoped to revise a short story for a submission call that’s due on the 15th, but I don’t think I’ll have the time to get something ready for it. I do have a story that might fit and needs resolution in a revision, though. There’s still time, of course, but I am not writing as fast as I used to be able to do. Maybe once the muscles get more warmed up? One never knows, does one?

I just saw the Milton forecast, which has me worried and concerned for my central Florida peeps. Take care and be safe, everyone!

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great day–may be back later!

  1. If you’re a local and don’t know where Hastings is, you’re not alone. I didn’t, either, until she stayed there on a visit sometime in the last few years. It’s one of those little streets in the lower Garden District that only exist for a block or so. It also joins into the intersection at Magazine and Felicity; there are two lanes that veer off to the right to stay on Magazine, and if you veer left you can go down the one block of Hastings. It creates a pie-shaped block that comes to a point at the intersection, and there’s a small park there, and Gris-Gris restaurant is on both Hastings on one side and Magazine on the other. ↩︎
  2. I have a very strong and powerful ego, don’t ever be fooled into thinking I don’t. Knowing how bad it can be is why I go to such an opposite extreme; I don’t like egomaniacal authors who think everything they write is deathless prose that will live for a thousand years–um, you ain’t Homer, dude. ↩︎

Somebody’s Watching Me

A month or so ago, Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying was one of those “special deals for ebooks,” and I can never pass up a classic for a mere $1.99 (I generally replace my hard copy books with ebooks when they are on sale, so I can donate the real book; but Ira Levin novels will never be donated), which put me in mind of him again (the book is a crime fiction classic), and I started thinking about what is the best part of two of my favorites by him, Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, which is the slow build of paranoia until the heroines are completely convinced that everyone is in on it and there’s no one she can trust. This is what I consider “women’s noir,” which is books that depict and explore women’s fears (which is why Gothics were so popular, I think; the wife can never trust the husband and always thinks he is trying to kill her–before the real culprit is exposed and they have their happily ever after. This, to me, mimics what it’s like for a woman when she gets married in real life; she wants to believe in her marriage and love, but how many times has that turned to ashes and dust in reality? Husbands kill wives or cheat on them or leave them; all these marriage fears were tentpoles of Gothics). I was going to revisit both novels–I had some other things I wanted to talk about with The Stepford Wives, and its similarities to Rosemary’s Baby, but I couldn’t find my copy of the latter so went with the former.

Since 2015, the term “gaslighting” has come back into vogue, with small wonder. Gaslighting can make you question your own judgment and your grasp on reality1; something many of us have experienced over the past nearly ten years and it isn’t an enjoyable experience.

Paranoia, combined with not being believed, makes for a fantastic novel that is very difficult to pull off; I can think of any number of films and books that use paranoia as a driving theme for their plots, and I always enjoy them. There really is nothing more frustrating than being being not believed about something that’s happened–or is happening–to you. It can make you crazy, make you question yourself and your own grasp of reality. It’s horrible and cruel in reality, and it’s something everyone can relate to because we have all not been believed at some point in our lives. It’s happened to me enough times (including losing jobs) that it certainly resonates with me. (I have an idea for a gaslighting/paranoia short story that I’ve been wanting to write for some time now.)

So, needless to say, I greatly enjoyed reading my advance copy of Alison Gaylin’s upcoming January release, We Are Watching.

It’s been the longest day of Meg Russo’s life, and it isn’t even half over. Her stomach gnaws at her, her hands heavy on the steering wheel. But when she glances at the clock on the dashboard, she sees that it’s a little shy of 11:30 a.m., which means that Meg, her husband, Justin, and their daugheter, Lily, have only been on the road for an hour. They’ve got at least three more hours on the thruway, and then they’ll have to contend with the series of veinlike country roads Meg and Justin haven’t traversed since their own college days. If they don’t hit too much traffic, they should be in Ithaca by five, which now feels like some point in a future so distant, Meg is incapable of envisioning it.

Time is strange that, the past eighteen years zooming by in an instant, all of it leading up to a single day that’s already lasted eons. Meg blames the stress of last night, wanting everything to be perfect for their daughter’s send-off, which led to thoughts of Lily’s first visit home for Thanksgiving break, which in turn made Meg think for the millionth time about how cold their house gets in the fall, and how Lily always complains about it. New windows, Meg had thought, lying in bed with her eyes open, envisioning insulated windows to replace those paper-thin sheets of glass, the same windows that were here when she and Justin bought the place twenty years ago–and it was a fixer-upper then. What if Lily came home to new windows? Meg mused, still awake in the wee hours of the morning. Will she have changed by then? Will she have grown too sophisticated to get excited over a warmer house? And so on, until the sky was pink and it was time to wake up and Meg had barely slept at all.

I’ve enjoyed Alison Gaylin’s work since I first read And She Was back in 2012, and have been a fan ever since, gobbling up each new book as she releases them. She has always been a terrific novelist, but what has been amazing to watch is how she pushes herself to do better with each book, tackling bigger themes and creating believable, relatable characters you can’t help but want to root for. We Are Watching may be her best yet, starting as a slow burn but building into an adrenaline boosting rollercoaster of a thriller.

The book opens with Meg and Justin taking their daughter Lily off to college, with all the emotions and fears and sense of loss that comes with a child leaving home and starting to move into their adulthood. Meg is likable, and so is her family. But as they drive a carload of skinheads pulls up alongside of them and start taking pictures. Meg reacts very strongly–so strongly that even I was like take a chill pill, girl!–which eventually leads to a crash that kills Justin, leaving the two women shattered shells of their previous selves. Lily decides to take time off from college and even Meg becomes housebound, despite needing to run her book store in the small Hudson Valley town they live in.

But things slowly begin closing in on both Meg and Lily; who were those skinheads in the other car? Why are truly strange, cult-like people showing up in the store or in town, chanting weird things at them? As Meg’s paranoia and fear grows, it soon becomes apparent that a religious cult is targeting her and her family, but why? But to find the truth, Meg has to not only survive the cult, which seems determined to kill her and her child, but when she has the time, to dig back into her own past to discover the truth–because the truth is the only thing that can set them free.

This book is fantastic, and I couldn’t put it down. It has all the hallmarks of a great Gaylin novel–a compelling and relatable main character doing the best she can in a terrible situation; a twisty plot full of surprises; and the kind of strong writing that makes her sentences and paragraphs sing.

Preorder it now and thank me in January when you finish reading it.

  1. The film this term comes from, Gaslight, is a great movie and Ingrid Bergman is terrific as the wife who isn’t sure if she is losing her mind; she deserved her Oscar and the film still holds up–and a very young Angela Lansbury makes her screen debut in it. ↩︎

I Wouldn’t Want To Live If You Didn’t Love Me

Sunday morning, and all is well in the Lost Apartment.

I woke up early this morning and, remembering, thought it might have been a dream, but no, a quick glance at the Internet told me it really did happen–Alabama did lose to Vanderbilt yesterday, 40-35. Hell, Arkansas came back to upset Tennessee last night while we were were watching ‘salem’s Lot (more on that later). What in the world was going on in college football yesterday? Admittedly, insane days like yesterday (Washington even went to Michigan and won. What the holy hell is going on this year?) are what make college football so fun to watch and experience as a fan; and I think 2024 might just be one of those insane “reset” seasons where everything goes out the window. Vanderbilt beating Alabama1 just two weeks after losing to Georgia State–another Vandy embarrassment–and now the concept of hope has shown up for the hapless Commodores; if they can beat an Alabama team, on any given Saturday, the ‘dores could beat anyone. Absolutely wild. I was watching a different game–I don’t even remember which this morning–when I saw that the score was 13-7 in the second quarter, Vandy leading, and I thought, what the hell and switched over to that game, and both Paul and I watched in stunned bemusement, riveted until the clock ticked to zero and the Vandy fans rushed the field, tore down the goalposts, and carried them three miles to throw them into the Cumberland River. I can only imagine what it was like to be a Vandy fan watching all of this yesterday.2 I do pity the new Alabama coach; he’s got a hell of a week to get through before next weekend’s South Carolina game (LSU comes back from the bye week to play Mississippi next week at home; the Rebs trounced South Carolina yesterday), but still have to play Tennessee, LSU and Oklahoma. They can still make the play-offs if they run the table, but I am beginning to wonder about that. Missouri was also beaten badly by Texas A&M yesterday, so now Texas is the only unbeaten SEC team still standing and there’s no telling who might run the table, who is good and who isn’t, and so forth. It’s kind of exciting, actually. CHAOS.

I did sleep late yesterday, got up and ran all over town and even went out to Metairie for my eye appointment (which has to be rescheduled; it was an on-line booking error), but was thoroughly exhausted when I got home from everything. I immediately started cleaning while the A&M game was on–no need to watch that thrashing, so it was mostly background noise. I did manage to get all the dishes done, and launder the bed linens, and pick up around here. The Lost Apartment looks better this morning, but I also need to finish assembling my desk chair, do some more cleaning up around here (the floors, the floors!) and hopefully do some reading and writing today as well. The Saints play tomorrow night (Taylor Swift has been rumored to be attending; so I imagine all day tomorrow local networks will have someone stationed at the airport to see if her plane lands), and the weather has been lovely since that sopping wet mess of a Friday we had here. I am glad to be up early this morning–clearly I needed to sleep in yesterday, and I was still easily exhausted, so I know I am still not at 100% yet…patience, Gregalicious, patience. You’re older and it takes longer to bounce back than it used to, and you’ve never had a major surgery before; it hasn’t even been a full year yet since the surgery.

I do have one errand to run today, and I should get it done this morning.

So, we decided to watch ‘salem’s Lot instead of watching the Tennessee game (which we should have watched, apparently; I never tire of watching Tennessee lose), and going into it, I knew that most of the King fans amongst my horror writer/reader social media friends didn’t care for it. As I watched the movie–which is a fairly competent vampire horror movie–I immediately saw what the problem with this film adaptation was going to be, and even understood why even the cheesy two-part television version with David Soul failed. I have always thought of ‘salem’s Lot as “Peyton Place with vampires, and that strength of the novel–the townspeople themselves, their relationships with each other and all the long-simmering feuds and gossips and pettiness–was the primary strength of the novel, as is its pacing: it begins as a slow building burn, and the momentum just keeps building. Everyone knows the story is about vampires now; it’s even a bit of an homage, in its own way, to Dracula–there’s even a scene in the book where Matt Burke reminds Ben of Van Helsing–but when I first read the paperback from Signet back in the fall of 1976 in Kansas, I had no idea what it was about. I just knew it was scary, it was about evil in a small town, and the writer was the guy who wrote Carrie, which I had read in one sitting a year earlier. So, I was enjoying how the town is originally shown, a small town that’s like every other small town, that idyllic vision of America that the right keeps forcing on us all–small town America is the real America as this Norman Rockwell painting/Mayberry like life, and it’s anything but that. (Small town America is the real America, but not in the way they mean–small towns are composites of the society as a whole, with percentage wise just as much crime, adultery, incest and passive-aggression as the rest of the country, no matter how much better they believe they are than urban dwellers.) That slow build, as we settle into Jerusalem’s Lot as a town like any other, with likable people and unlikable people whose dirty secrets King allows us to see; in the first half of the book it’s almost like reading Peyton Place; Jerusalems Lot even has the Marsten House as Peyton Place had Samuel’s castle (which was also the name of Allison’s novel in the book). Something dark is going on in the town, and just getting started, which we get glimpses of from time to time–a dog killed and left on the cemetery fence spikes; the disappearance of Ralphie Glick and his brother’s strange sickness and death…but it isn’t until Danny Glick shows up at Mark Petrie’s window do we know that it’s actually vampires, and then the entire book flips and no longer lazily meanders along on its assigned path; it then becomes a thriller that moves with the speed of a locomotive.

This pacing is what most readers like me (and I suspect a lot of others) loved the most about the book; I always loved the town-stuff as much as the vampires, honestly, but that kind of pacing is impossible in a film or a two-part television movie–you can’t have the first half be meandering and slowly moving along the path of the story, folks who have no idea what’s happening in their town and still aren’t entirely sure as the depopulation moves faster and faster, because you risk losing your audience. This was the problem with the David Soul version–the pacing was the same throughout, which isn’t the way the story reads. In this film version they chose to abandon everything from the story that isn’t about vampires, and to just make a standard horror film about vampires. On that level, the movie works. It’s a standard vampire movie that moves very quickly, just as the second half of the book does, but by cutting out all the stuff that made us care about the characters, we aren’t as vested, and when they die, we don’t really feel it much or care–every death in the book was a fucking tragedy, and so the movie is actually kind of soulless. We aren’t given enough character development to care when characters die. I think the only true way to film ‘salem’s Lot successfully, it needs to be a six or eight episode series to be done truly properly. There was hardly anything about the Marsten House in the movie, and that’s a significant change from the book. It’s just there, and we have no idea what kind of research Ben is doing for his novel or why he even came back. The loss of all the supporting characters that really made the book so strong can be felt deeply in the film. It’s just a competent vampire movie, but it isn’t ‘salem’s Lot, but I did like the big scene at the drive-in movie theater.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I want to get a lot done today, and here’s hoping that shall come to pass.

  1. No one ever worries about losing to Vanderbilt; it’s usually seen as a bye for most teams because Vanderbilt has always been terrible in football; they’ve never won the conference in all the years of belonging, haven’t beaten Alabama since 1984, and are always cellar-dwellers in the SEC (one of my favorite things to remind people is that Senator Tatertown the moron lost to Vanderbilt as a football coach; now Kalen DeBoer will also have that distinction. What a wake-up call for Tuscaloosa, and how wild that it happened one week after Alabama beat Georgia, handing them their first regular season loss in 42 games. I mean, good for Vanderbilt, but whoa, what the hell, Bama? ↩︎
  2. Vanderbilt always has more visiting fans in their stadium than their own fans; at one point I was in the kitchen washing dishes and would hear the crowd cheer, so would come take a look–they were Alabama cheers, and they were louder than the smaller contingent of Vandy fans there. ↩︎

She Called Me Baby

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment, with a trip to Metairie looming for an eye appointment. Yesterday was a bit more hectic than I would have liked, beginning with having to go in to the office on what is usually my remote day (meetings, mostly, and some catch up on work I didn’t get to on Thursday), and then I had errands to run all afternoon. It was a gloomy, off and on raining kind of day, so when I got home I was very happy to be safely back into the Lost Apartment so I could do my chores and do some work. I was very tired last night when I was finished with everything, so just kind of zonked out in my chair. We spent the last few nights getting caught up on our shows (we’re now watching Agatha All Along, Bad Monkey, Only Murders in the Building, Grotesquerie, English Teacher, and American Sports Story), and I am hoping to get to watch the new ‘salem’s Lot movie aat some point this weekend, and I’d like to watch Fall Guy, too.

And I need to write this weekend, big time.

Thursday night, when I was working on the Scotty Bible and was marking pages in Mississippi River Mischief, I realized the murder victim in the book was a corrupt politician who goes by JD; prescience, perhaps? It also reminded me of something from a book I had read a very long time ago–Sarah Schulman’s Stagestruck. The thesis of the book was about the similarities between a very popular Broadway musical (Rent) and her nove, People in Trouble. Sarah had actually attended and reviewed Rent, and while it seemed familiar to her, she just dismissed it as being inspired by the struggling artist scene in lower Manhattan in the 1980s and thought it played very false, given her own experience; it wasn’t until later when a friend told her “you must be so mad about Rent”–and she went back and reread her book. (In all honesty, I went on to read People in Trouble and also watched the film of Rent and I also saw the similarities; she wasn’t inventing anything.) But the point of this particular story is that at the time, as an unpublished aspiring novelist, I found it a bit of a reach that she didn’t remember her own book…but doing the Scotty Bible–and talking with other authors–I realized that not remembering your own book isn’t that much of a stretch, and it does get harder the more book you have; the exponential possibility that you won’t remember your own books grows with each new book you write. that the piece of art basically ripped off her piece of art–and she couldn’t remember much I have been routinely shocked about how much of the Scotty series had slipped from my memory banks as I enter the information from each book into the master document; the huge plot points that are the most memorable things about them…but gone completely. I’d forgotten my villainous politician JD, and I only wrote that book last year. I’d forgotten a lot of the stuff in most of the books. I thought the one I’d really be able to temember was Bourbon Street Blues, and nope. I’d forgotten about the entire sequence in the swamp, the fire, and who the first victim was…and I also was able to remember, while going through it, what I was trying to do with him as a character as more time passed and he gained more experience with criminality and human behavior.

And given all those experiences, it was very important to me to ensure he remained a positive person who prefers to expect the best of people, not the worst, and never become cynical. Cynicism was one of the most powerful traits I wrote into Chanse, and I didn’t want to do that over again.

It was also rainy and dreary all day yesterday, and much as I love rain, it can damper your spirits a little especially when you’re already a bit fatigued. But I am feeling good today (I slept really late this morning) and like I can get a lot accomplished. I am going to make groceries on the way home from my eye appointment. I am going to run an errand in my neighborhood on foot when I get back from that, and I am going to try to get the house cleaned up and do some writing this afternoon while football games play in the living room. I also want to read some more of Gabino’s book and get more into it. Tomorrow morning I will run another errand that I don’t want to do much today–Fresh Market is close so it’s an easy thing to do…maybe I can run it later today and get it over with, but I suspect after getting home from the errands today I won’t want to leave the house so much.

And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up so I can get moving on the errands and the other things to get done around the house. Have a lovely Saturday, best of luck to your favorite team, and I am heading into the spice mines. I might be back later; I am itching to finish my review of Monsters, and the Menendez Brothers in general.

Another Lonely Song

Friday morning and have to go into the office for a number of meetings and things today, but hope to get out of there around 2ish to run errands and head home. Huzzah! I slept well last night (and all the way through; didn’t get up once) and feel pretty terrific this morning. Maybe it was the bellinis I had with dinner last night? Perhaps.

Yesterday was lovely. I had a nice day at work, then came home and wrote before my dinner plans. I managed to finish Chapter 7, which was enormously pleasing, and then went to meet my friend for dinner. Look at me, out on a school night and having two drinks with dinner! But it was very nice. Lilette, the restaurant on Magazine where we had dinner, is marvelous; I always have a good time whenever I have a meal there. The conversation was also quite fabulous; and it was a very contented Gregalicious who got home from dinner around eight thirty. Paul and I watched another episode of American Sports Story; it’s an interesting exploration of toxic masculinity in sport, and how damaging that was for someone like Aaron Hernandez, deeply closeted and so terrified anyone might ever find out. (I did wonder what Tim Tebow would have said to him if Aaron had told him the truth–I think we know, and what a shame there wasn’t a single person in his life he could be honest with.) It’s very well done (although some of the reproductions of Florida football games were clearly reproductions and not actual game footage; it may have even been CGI but it didn’t look real), and the acting is, as always and ever in a Ryan Murphy show, superb. The young man playing Hernandez is quite good. It’s also quite excellent at showing what a monster Urban Meyer is as a coach, and how little he actually cared about his players (every time I think that Urban Meyer had Joe Burrow on the bench, wasting his talent for two years, I smile); I have never liked nor trusted that man. He’s clearly a good coach–he won three national titles at two different schools–but he’s not the kind of coach whose players speak well of him–and his teams at Florida were clearly out of control. (He also had Cam Newton on the bench at Florida; that’s two Heisman Trophy winning quarterbacks who rode the bench for him.)

I do have some errands to run after work; I have to get the mail and pick up prescriptions and maybe do a bit of a grocery run. I also have laundry to do once I get home, and then I think I’ll be in for the day. I have another writer friend in town this weekend that I am hoping to get to see, so I think I’ll try to do that tomorrow. I also want to work on the book some more this weekend, and start playing around with the next one I want to write. I want to finish reading Gabino’s new book–I started it last weekend, and it’s off to a really powerful start. It grabs you by the throat and won’t let you look away, no matter how badly you might want to!

I also have some cleaning up to do around here as well. It never really ends, does it? At least my filing it pretty much caught up, and I certainly can’t let the inbox stack up the way it has in the past. Staying on top of things is usually the smart thing to do…but I sometimes get lazy, particularly if I’m tired; that’s when I really don’t want to do anything when I get home except catch up on the news. I am so much happier now that I’ve blocked every news source that started the “get rid of Biden” nonsense in July; the age and mental acuity of a presidential candidate ceased to be an issue in this election once the President dropped out, despite the patentedly obvious decline of the Republican candidate, not to mention his planned vengeance tour if he wins. After doing everything they could to ensure Hillary lost in 2016, they have the nerve to continue to both-sides everything while pretending this is a normal horse race election because they are a national and historical disgrace, the New York Times editorial board endorsed the Vice-President while continuing their horrendous, clearly partisan reporting.

Your words are hollow when you are sane-washing an incredibly dangerous narcissist. It’s not what you say, but what you actually do, and I will never forgive nor forget their collaborationist quisling bullshit as long as I live.

So, after work today I am going to go run those errands and then come home to be productive. I have my to-do list ready to have things checked off, and there’s some writing that definitely needs to be done this weekend. Next weekend I may be meeting Dad in Alabama, and will probably head up to Kentucky for a week around Halloween; not sure when that would be, but it’s on the schedule.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines on this rainy Friday morning. Have a great day, and I may be back later; I’m tricky that way.